There's some movement in the Oracle-Google lawsuit today, but it's rather difficult to determine just what kind of movement. The jury was told by the judge Alsup to assume APIs are copyrightable - something Alsup still has to determine later during trial - and with that in mind, the judge ruled Google violated Oracle's copyright on Java. However, the jury did not come to an agreement on a rather crucial question: whether or not it was fair use. All in all, a rather meaningless verdict at this point, since it's incomplete. Also, what kind of nonsense is it for a judge to tell a jury to assume something is illegal? Am I the only one who thinks that's just complete insanity?

Why would the judge have to make a new law, if it's not illegal, it's legal. If there needs to be a new law, it's up to politicians to create them. These new laws are triggered by unfair results in trials, granted, you loose some effectivity there, but it avoids the result of the fairness of a trial to depend on one (or a few) mans'(mens') vision(s). A judge only has to decide whether or not it is illegal what has been done. That's where the common law, to me, (and to thom) seems so flawed. The seggregation of power is really not respected in common law and has very nasty unwanted sideeffects that are not negated by the advantage of a nimble judicial system.